Islamic State after the fall of the caliphate in Baghouz
Islamic State is down but not quite out, and it could be revived.
Baghouz is the sole surviving pocket of Islamic State territory, along a narrow strip in eastern Syria a few hundred metres long, hemmed in by the Euphrates on one side and desert on the other.
The last militants are dug in among the remnants of their caliphate, hiding in holes, among tents, destroyed buildings, an earthen berm, bombed-out oil tankers and a few date palms, surrounded by the mostly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces and their US and coalition advisers.
The militants are refusing to surrender while negotiating for a deal to leave town, similar to that offered fighters in Raqqa last year. The besieged enclave has only a few days’ food, and Kurdish commanders expect it to fall within days.
About 6500 people were evacuated in 24 hours, including about 500 Islamic State militants — mostly with foreign nationalities — Mostafa Bali, head of the SDF media office, told Reuters yesterday.
The exodus had slowed the military operations, which resumed four days earlier. SDF commanders had earlier delayed the final assault because hundreds of civilians — including Yazidi women and girls forced into sexual slavery after Islamic State murdered their men and boys in 2014 — are trapped in Baghouz.
Bloody battles
Before the battle for Baghouz began this year, this sleepy farming district on the northeast bank of the Euphrates was mainly known outside Syria for the nearby archeological site of Tell Baghouz, excavated in the 1930s and the source of some of the finest known specimens of ancient Samarra pottery, many of them now in the Louvre in Paris.
For Syrians, Baghouz — perched on the edge of the great Syrian Desert, near the Iraqi border crossing at al-Qaim — was notorious for a string of bloody battles in 2016-17, when Islamic State, the SDF and the army of President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Republic launched overlapping offensives to control the crossing.
Over a decade ago, when I served with coalition forces in Baghdad, Baghouz was a jumping-off point for foreign fighters entering Iraq from Syria. Militants would start from there in four-wheel drives, skirt the Qaim crossing, then drive directly on a compass course across the desert, aiming for the distinctive smokestacks of a Russian-built power plant on Baghdad’s southwest outskirts, which had become an al-Qa’ida stronghold.
I can still smell the stink of that place. When troops of the US 10th Mountain Division captured it in October 2006, they found a beheading room, recording equipment and floors littered with detritus from Syria.
Two weeks ago SDF fighters, closing in on Islamic State’s last Syrian stronghold at Upper Baghouz, found a different form of detritus: a battered copy of Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones, a seminal jihadist tract that influenced generations of militants including the September 11 hijackers and many of those who journeyed from Baghouz to Baghdad.
The book was discovered in the dirt outside a base and makeshift hospital, lying alongside a suicide vest, identity cards of fighters from Aleppo and a teddy bear, according to the Associated Press.
When Baghouz does fall, it will indeed be a milestone for Islamic State, which will have lost its last territorial foothold in the Levant.
It will be a milestone in view of the immense chaos and destruction inflicted by the group since its seizure of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in June 2014, the declaration of the caliphate the following month in the city’s main mosque by its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the long toll of battles, atrocities and catastrophes that followed.
The group has fallen a long way from its peak of 70,000 fighters controlling more than a dozen towns, a population the size of Singapore’s, with revenue — from oil, taxation, extortion and smuggling — exceeding $1 million a day. But this is far from the end.
‘Caliph’ on the run
Baghdadi’s whereabouts are uncertain but witnesses claim to have seen him in Keshma, a village near Baghouz, last September, when he narrowly survived a coup attempt by a faction of North African fighters.
He then moved to Baghouz for several months, before fleeing to the desert with his bodyguard in early January as the SDF encircled the town. The desert may not prove much of a sanctuary. In this region the cover is in the cities, among people.
Life on the run will be tough for Baghdadi, who has diabetes and bears wounds received in a coalition airstrike in 2015.
And while Russian and Iranian-backed forces operate to the south, the Kurds control the area north of Baghouz and Iraqi military and Shia militias operate around al-Qaim. They are hunting down Islamic State survivors in the western desert.
Any of these groups would be delighted to kill Baghdadi, but while his lungs still have breath Islamic State lives and could eventually revive.
If it does recover, it will almost certainly not be in the same form. The group’s claim to fame also turned out to be its greatest weakness: its ability to put thousands of troops in the field, operating like a conventional military force with tanks, artillery, armoured vehicles and mortars.
Seizing, governing and then trying to hold cities against determined counter-attacks, dying in place rather than withdrawing to fight another day, and mounting counter-offensives all across Syria and Iraq, Islamic State thought, acted and fought like a state.
If anything, once its enemies shook off their surprise and rallied against it, the group’s state-like behaviour made it simpler to find and easier to destroy.
As the territorial entity that was Baghdadi’s caliphate withers, there are already signs that the group is falling back into guerilla mode.
Attacks — including bombings, raids, assassinations and sectarian executions — are already on the rise in parts of Iraq and Syria that were previously believed free of Islamic State remnants.
Underground cells persist in many parts of the region and retain the capacity and desire to attack, though for now their operations are of a scale and intensity far below Islamic State at its peak.
New forms of terror
Eliminating the guerilla remnants will take years, if not decades, of patient intelligence, counter-insurgency and police work, and given the dysfunctional politics and governance of the region, any effective counter-guerilla effort is hard to imagine.
So, if the caliphate rises again, it may be in a different guise — akin to its previous incarnations as a terrorist and insurgent group, rather than its recent failed attempt to be a conventional state.
And, of course, Iraq and Syria are not the only places with an Islamic State presence. North and west Africa have their own Islamic State wilayat (“provinces”), as does Afghanistan.
Fighters aligned with Islamic State seized the Philippine city of Marawi in 2017. It took a military operation involving tanks and airstrikes several months to recapture the largely destroyed town. Rebuilding is still under way, and Australians are in The Philippines training and advising the armed forces there on complex urban operations.
And then there is “ISIS International”, a loose, ad hoc, self-selected network of individual militants worldwide.
The inspirational effect of Baghdadi’s declaration of the caliphate and the existence of a “liberated” zone in the Middle East may be diminishing, but Baghdadi is almost certain to be seen as a martyr and his followers as heroes by a certain crowd of self-radicalised individuals.
Fight will continue
Thus, even with the destruction of the territorial caliphate as it existed over the past four years in Syria and Iraq, between the regional provinces and ISIS International, Islamic State can be expected to continue, giving new meaning to its motto “Remaining and Expanding”.
Its own survivors as well as other terrorist groups have learned important lessons from Islamic State’s rise and fall, and these lessons are likely to inform future jihadist movements, giving Baghdadi and his group an enduring legacy.
As for Syria, Assad’s regime has now — with help from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah — largely regained control over the country. The northwest province of Idlib is still held by a collection of nationalist and jihadist rebel groups including al-Qa’ida ally Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
Some Islamic State survivors may rally to Idlib, but given the history of intense rivalry among jihadist groups in Syria, their welcome is likely to be uncertain at best, and the Damascus government has begun preparing an offensive in the area.
Turkey has opposed the idea, fearing a massive influx of refugees from Idlib, but it remains very much a possibility for later this year.
In the northeast, the Kurdish forces that have done and suffered so much to defeat Islamic State, are about to be unceremoniously dumped by the US, which, at President Donald Trump’s direction, plans to pull out all but 200 troops by next month.
Turkey — which finds the Syrian Kurds threatening to its security because of their links with its own Kurdish separatists — has talked of an offensive in the northeast region but looks likely to hold off, given the militarily capable Kurdish forces in that area and Ankara’s concerns about Idlib.
So, Islamic State in its current, territorial form is about to disappear in Syria. But its worldwide networks and provinces, along with growing guerilla activity sponsored by the group in Iraq and Syria, suggest it is far from defeated.
It may or may not revive, but if it does it will almost certainly not be in the form of a conventional, state-like entity as seen since 2014.
And other groups continue to fight in Syria, which — even if all violence stopped tomorrow — is still devastated, and will need of decades of reconstruction.
All of which is to say, it’s not over yet.
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Yazidi survivor’s experience of enslavement, hunger and despair
DAHUK, Iraq: Baseh Hammo was 38 when she was enslaved by Islamic State militants.
Raped and abused, she was sold 17 times among members of the so-called caliphate, and moved across a vast stretch of the territoryIslamic State once controlled in northern Iraq and Syria.
Her ordeal came to an end in January in the Syrian village of Baghouz, when an Islamic State member took pity on her as thefinal battle loomed with US-led Syrian Kurdish forces. He put her on a truck with his own family and allowed them to leavethe village.
She was picked up by Syrian Kurdish forces and reunited with her two daughters in Iraq.
Yet many Yazidis, followers of a minority faith, are still missing five years after militants stormed Yazidi towns and villagesin Iraq’s Sinjar region and abducted women and children.
Women were forced into sexual slavery and boys were taken to be indoctrinated in jihadi ideology. Hopes surged last monthduring a two-week pause in the US-led coalition’s assault on Baghouz that some of the estimated 3000 Yazidis still unaccountedfor would emerge.
But few turned up among thousands who streamed out of the village. Hussein Karo, who heads the Yazidi Rescue Bureau in Iraq’sregional Kurdish government, says only 47 Yazidis were rescued.
Hammo says she fears many may never return home and that the offensive endangers Yazidis who are still in the village. Someare refusing to leave their children behind with their Islamic State fathers while others are staying out of conviction, havingadopted the jihadi ideology, she says. Many are simply too terrified to flee.
Hammo said her days as a slave were consumed with loneliness and violence. One of her 17 owners, a Swede, would lock her inthe home for days without food while he went to fight. Another man, an Albanian, stomped on her hands in military boots, aftershe scolded him for buying a nine-year-old slave girl.
Hunger gripped the remains of the caliphate in her final months in captivity. By the time she reached Baghouz, she was eatinggrass.
“I cannot even look at anything the colour green any more,” says a frail Hammo.
Now staying in bleak camps for the displaced in Iraq, she says international airstrikes killed some Yazidis living as slavesin the caliphate.
Hammo says she had urged a Yazidi woman married to an Uzbek Islamic State fighter to leave Baghouz with her, but the woman,who has had two children with the man, refused.
“She said she’d blow herself up first,” says Hammo.
Another Yazidi woman in Baghouz, who had been married off to a Saudi man, was forced to give up two of her boys to be trainedas Islamic State fighters. “She said she couldn’t leave without them,” Hammo says.
AP